Lewis, Wyndham

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Wyndham Was Respected by Orwell for this Book
The master race of artists
Tarr- The 1918 Version

Tarr: The 1918 Version
Wyndham Lewis
Manufacturer: Black Sparrow Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

Wyndham Was Respected by Orwell for this Book.......2002-03-23

Wyndham's power derives from his tendency to be reactionary. Orwell, Pound, T.S. Elliot and Lewis all began with leftist tendencies, and evolved into a realization of the folly of superimposed mind control as practiced by the left. This novel is a stark satire of these "artistic" propoganda aspects as channeled through art. To attempt to label Lewis with all the ghastly "--isms" is to attempt to superimpose a like kind of modern leftist template over a wonderful '30's rebellion against exactly this kind of labelling. Hard as it may be to believe it, this putative thought control was even worse then, during the political ascendancy of communism.

The master race of artists.......2001-03-06

In his first novel, set in the cafes and nightspots of Paris during the beginning of the twentieth century, Wyndham Lewis presents the reader with a gallery of figures who live as a master race of artists. The action consists mostly of rows, one culminating in violence, during which the cast of poseurs and atavists engage in esoteric debates, which enable Lewis to weave in his own political and artistic concerns into the manifold of polemic. Typically of his novels, with their Fascist, racist, sexist, elitist biases, "Tarr" pulls no punches, assailing conventional bourgeois values in art and culture and proclaiming the figure of the artist as supreme. Along with Ezra Pound, Lewis was the founder of Vorticism, the British counterpart of Futurism, and also the joint editor of Blast!, the magazine in which Vorticist views were enunciated. With its glorification of velocity, violence, modernity and the machine, Vorticism's major tenets are consistently applied in the novel, with its brutal, striking, seemingly spontaneous prose style and its portrayal of the artist as a sort of automaton who will risk everything to attain his end, regardless of the damage that this may cause to others. However, the novel is let down by its lack of incident and the way in which the author blatantly allows his characters to act as mouthpieces for views which are clearly his own. A minor, and now almost forgotten, classic.

Tarr- The 1918 Version.......2000-02-20

With Tarr, Wyndham Lewis drags the reader through a few months in the lives of a collection of relentlessly self-absorbed and repulsive expatriates infesting the cafes and pensions of Paris just prior to the First World War. Cynicism and fermenting racial hatreds simmer just below the surface of a stew of intellectual banter and social intrigue. Conspicuous in its absence is any sense of sincerity or personal integrity of feelings. When a sincere response does erupt, it results in absurdity as when Tarr attacks the hat of his opponent in frustration after failing to win his point in a philosophical discussion. All of the principal characters are obsessive poseurs whose every behavior towards one another is propelled by a calculated maneuvering designed to improve one's position in an informal, but powerful, pecking order. The machinations are as complex as the motivations are shallow. More often than not, an agenda outruns the control of the agent who sets it in motion and the character then watches helplessly as events destined to blight his life unfold before him. Depressingly, the players do not appear to gain any insight from their foibles regarding the error of their ways and Lewis' dim view of the character of his fellow man is unleavened by the humor that finds its way into his later novels. The greatest flaw I found in Lewis' Tarr is one typical of the first novels of writers possessing an active intellect. The narrative flow is occasionally disrupted by the author's attempt to incorporate his own social and philosophical theories into the dialogue of his characters. And although this volume lacks the imagination and sophistication of Lewis' later works, there are a number of finely wrought passages which foreshadow the talent he is beginning to develop. My favorite;

For the last hour he had been accumulating difficulties, or rather unearthing some new one at every step. Impossible to tackle "en masse," they were all there before him. The thought of "settling everything before he went," now appeared monstrous. He had, anyhow, started these local monsters and demons, fishing them to the light. Each had a different vocal explosiveness, inveighing unintelligibly against each other. The only thing to be done was to herd them all together and march them away for inspection at leisure.

Tarr, The 1918 Version is an enjoyable and worthwhile read if you have the time, but if you will read only one book by Lewis, leave this one on the shelf and, instead, make a grab for The Apes of God.

The Hitler cult
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The Hitler cult
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The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (New York Review Books Classics)
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Beef, death dealing

The Owl is All Wise Atop the Bust.

'Criticise as some have done/Hitherto herebefore'

This book is indispensable!

The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (New York Review Books Classics)

Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Release Date: 2003-04-30

Book Description

The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "It would seem at a hasty glance that to make an anthology of Bad Verse is on the whole a simple matter . . . On the contrary . . . Bad Verse has its canons, like Good Verse. There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse. It has been the constant preoccupation of the compilers to include in this book chiefiy good Bad Verse." Here indeed one finds the best of the worst of the greatest poets of the English language, masterpieces of the maladroit by Dryden, Wordsworth, and Keats, among many others, together with an index ("Maiden, feathered, uncontrolled appetites of, 59;. . . Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, 91") that is itself an inspired work of folly.

Customer Reviews:

Beef, death dealing.......2005-10-13

This book is a gem. It's a little hard to read from cover to cover -- kind of like a box of bitter chocolate, you come back to it again and again. The index is the ultimate scream, though.

The Owl is All Wise Atop the Bust........2005-10-11

These poems were chosen from American and English Literature to signify the worst in a history of pratfalls as exhibited by some of the big names. "If you glance at History's pags, in all lands and eras known, you will find the buried ages far more wicked than our own; as you scan each word and letter you will realize it more, that the world today is better than it ever was before."

Poe's "Eulalie' was chosen: "I dwelt alone in a world to moan,
And my soul was a stagnant tide,
Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride --
Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride."

Longfellow's 'Excelsior' goes thusly: "The shades of night were falling fast, as trough an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!
...
There in the twilight cold and grey, lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky, serene and far, A voice fell, like a falling star, Excelsior!"

"Something to love, some tree or flow'r,
Something to nurse in my lonely bow'r,
Some dog to follow, where'er I roam,
Some bird to warble my welcome home,
Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!

Some to love, oh, let me see!
Something that's filled with a love for me;
Beloved by none, it is sad to live,
And 'tis sad to die and leave none to grieve;
And fond and true let the lov'e one prove.
Something to love, oh, something to love!"

'A Lesson for the Proud'

"The scheme is tried; and shall it prosper too?
Yes; what can't steam and gold united do?
Near the commencement of Victoria's reign,
Both sea-chiefs started on th' Atlantic main;
While all the merchantmen they met and pass'd,
Long looks of wonder on the heroes cast;
Their proud, majestic march, their stately air,
Their god-like prowess, and their length of car,
Made gazers all, with great reluctance, see
Their own comparative nonentity."

Wordsworth wrote: "Yet, helped by Genius -- untired Comforter,
The presence even of a stuffed Owl for her can cheat the time." The Capricorn edition has eight cartoons from the works of Max Beerbohm. There is a subject index and an author index. A bit of nonsense, but D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee must have had fun chosing what they considered the worst of the lot. Of course, everyone has his own opinion and, what's bad for someone may be good to someone else and vice versa. That's what a reviewer if for, to cause another to think differently from what he might otherwise. But, of course, you must have an open mind.

'Criticise as some have done/Hitherto herebefore'.......2003-09-03

This is not just a collection of any old bad verse. McGonagall for one is not represented. Nor are the forgotten poetasters `...the semi-literate, the nature-loving contributor to the county newspaper...the hearty but ill-equipped patriot, the pudibond but urgent Sapphos...' to take a sample of the disregarded from the anthologists' preface. The main qualifying factor for inclusion in The Stuffed Owl is solemnity. It may be that now and again Wyndham Lewis and Lee deviate slightly from this criterion, and I wonder whether in Boston churches they still sing

`Ye monsters of the bubbling deep/Your Maker's praises shout/Up from the sands, ye codlings, leap/And wag your tails about'

but a fairer sample of the `target' style would be e.g. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's

`Will you oftly/Murmur softly?' or `Our Euripides the human/With his droppings of warm tears'; or Crabbe's `Brother, there dwell, yon northern hill below,/Two favourite maidens, whom `tis good to know,/Young, but experienced'.

The very greatest can be found here at their less-than-greatest. The title of the book is itself a quotation from Wordsworth. Toweringly great poet though he was, he lacked, as everyone knows, any sense of the ridiculous whatsoever. He really did cite

`...the umbrella spread/To weather-fend the Celtic herdsman's head' as an instance of spreading decadence. One inclusion that seems to me marginal is from Resolution and Independence, the celebrated question to the old leech-gatherer, betraying that William had not been listening to a word the old fellow said

`My question eagerly did I renew/How is it that you live, and what is it you do?' Say what you like, I still find nothing absurd in it and I still think this is one of his greatest poems. How this got into The Stuffed Owl is obvious - the whole scenario was more than Lewis Carroll could take, and it inspired him to perhaps the most hilarious parody (along with Housman's Fragment of a Greek Tragedy) I have ever read, the White Knight's tale of the aged aged man a-sitting on a gate.

The funniest things in the book are not so much the poems themselves as the commentaries. These are mainly the work of Wyndham Lewis and Lee, but there is some Olympian demolition by Macaulay of a certain Robert Montgomery (1807-1855) who specialised in obsequious piety. The anthologists themselves contribute a wonderful preface, the captions over the extracts, and, maybe best of all, the index. From this you can easily access, say, `Leeds, poetical aspects of'; or `Oysters, reason why they cannot be crossed in love'; or `Trains, rapture of catching'.

How they must have enjoyed doing it all! It appeals quite inordinately to my sense of humour, and perhaps it will to yours.

This book is indispensable!.......1999-08-25

This collection is much more interesting *and* funny than a more recent anthology of bad poetry, because it draws so heavily on great poets--Wordsworth, Byron, Poe et al. Laughing at semiliterate amateurs is a cheap shot. The wonder is the follies of the talented, and Stuffed Owl displays these. The introductory matter and editorial comments are also brilliantly funny, and the index--yes, the index--is a scream. THIS TITLE SHOULD BE READILY AVAILABLE (publisher please note.)

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Pretentious and deliberately exasperating

Tarr (Twentieth Century Classics)
Wyndham Lewis
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

Pretentious and deliberately exasperating.......2005-11-02

I picked up this book because an English major friend of mine said it was the most difficult book she ever read. I agree, but its difficulty lies not in any depth of thought or high artistic value; rather, this is an exhausting, dull read and I quickly grew to hate the characters and the author's writing style.

I read somewhere that it is a grave mistake to use foreign language phrases more than once or twice in an English language text. Perhaps it was in Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style". I wonder if they were speaking specifically of this book. On an average of once per page there is a German, Latin, or French phrase inserted in a dialogue or, even worse, the narration, and it isn't like these phrases are well known. The sole purpose of these, in my opinion, is to further obfuscate a work that is already so desperately trying to be well-known for it's complications.

As for the characters, I'm not asking that an author make any of their creations lovable, sympathetic, redeemable people. But the self absorption and self-importance of these pathetically deluded people was not only obviously contrived but ultimately served no real purpose.

Do yourself a favor. Avoid this book. If you want to read a writer that willfully but highly successfully buries the meaning of his writing under layers and layers of abstraction, pick up the works of Dylan Thomas and let the enigmatic beauties of his poems unlock themselves for you at the most inopportune times.

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Blast I (Blast One)
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Blast II (Blast Two)
Tarr: The 1918 Version

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Self Condemned
Wyndham Lewis
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ProductGroup: Book
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The Vulgar Streak
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Francois Villon
D. B. Wyndham Lewis
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Time and Western Man
Wyndham Lewis
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